EDH Decks: Rasputin (Patreon)

This is my fourth post in my series highlighting all of my EDH decks. My previous Commanders were Hazezon, The Locust God, and Animar.

Today, I'll focus on one of my favorite cards of all time, Rasputin Dreamweaver. If you don't remember what this card does (and many people don't), here it is:

Long story short, Rasputin comes into play with 7 counters that can be removed to make colorless mana. Amazingly, there is no limit to how many of the 7 counters you can use in a single turn. It's like a Tron in a single card!

To take advantage of this ability, I built a Commander deck full of blink effects to bring Rasputin back into play and reset the number of counters. This deck has gone through a few versions over time. Early on, I played around with limiting myself to only using old frame cards. Here was one version of this deck:

As you can see, I didn't have a lot of blink effects to choose from (I even had to include Tawnos's Coffin to try to maximize my blink effects--which is a pretty slow blink!) The deck mostly includes various ways to generate lots of mana so that I can make a bunch of angel tokens or Braingeyser/Stroke one of my opponents. After playing it for a while, I was getting pretty bored with it and taking it to Commander nights less and less. I eventually decided to rework the deck.

So what did I do? I went in the complete opposite direction and added a bunch of more recent cards. And instead of focusing on making a bunch of tokens, I decided to make some Eldrazi (if you're keeping track at home, this is my second Commander deck with a bunch of Eldrazi creatures). Eldrazi are kind of a nombo with blink effects, because they have cast triggers rather than enters-the-battlefield triggers. But I found this deck to be much more fun.

As I've mentioned in my previous Commander deck posts, the aesthetics of my decks are a crucial component for me. With this in mind, you can see above that I made a bunch of stylistic changes to my Rasputin deck.

Now the cards are all black border, and I changed to Zendikar lands because they felt more appropriate for an Eldrazi theme. Since I'm no longer restricting myself to old frame cards, the mana fixing is much better for a two-color deck. I also have more blink effects available. But most importantly, I can now include Vanish into Memory. Casting this onto Rasputin always feels so satisfying when I get to draw 4, discard 1, and gain 7 mana.

This is also my only Commander deck where I allow myself to include borderless cards. Unlike my other Commander decks where I try to use the older versions of most cards, it was fun to focus more on including some of my favorite recent artwork. Just check out these beautiful cards.

The most common question I get about this deck is why don't I include Eldrazi Displacer or Brago, King Eternal. The answer is simple. I don't find them fun! Displacer plus Rasputin is instantly infinite mana and infinite blinks, which makes the games too easy. And I don't have the patience to resolve Brago's combat trigger. So I just took them out. It is Commander after all, so there's no reason to feel pressure to include certain cards.

Here's a closer look at the cards in the deck.

Hope you enjoyed another look at one of my Commander decks. Let me know if you have any questions or card suggestions!